Monthly Archives: November 2010

UC visiting prof Lily Cho’s new book has just come out and can be found at Laidlaw Library. It’s called Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, and this Wednesday there will be a book launch, where Judy Fong Bates will host a Q&A session with the author. If you haven’t read the nice Toronto Star piece about the book, here’s a link.

I recently saw Sturla Gunnarson’s excellent documentary about David Suzuki, Force of Nature, which features excerpts from Suzuki’s December 2009 “legacy lecture.” This doesn’t sound like it would make for a good film, but actually it’s beautifully done, with excerpts from the lecture interwoven with personal stories, photos, and footage from Suzuki’s life, and wilderness images. Suzuki has expanded the lecture into a book, The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for Our Sustainable Future (available at Laidlaw Library).

The judges said “The Sentimentalists charts the painful search by a dutiful daughter to learn – and more importantly, to learn to understand – the multi-layered truth which lies at the moral core of her dying father’s life. Something happened to Napoleon Haskell during his tour of duty in Vietnam that changed his life and haunted the rest of his days. At the behest of his daughters, he moves from a trailer in North Dakota to a small lakeside town in Ontario where his family can only watch as his past slips away in a descending fog of senility. The writing here is trip-wire taut as the exploration of guilt, family and duty unfolds.”